Friday, December 24, 2010

A while ago I posted about my experiences with JSON-RPC. The conclusions were both positive and negative - JSON-RPC is a very promising protocol. Unfortunately I found that it is not so easy to find good client- and server-side libraries that support it. In particular, the JSON-RPC protocol handler in Android client needed to be implemented from scratch, without any library support.

Then one commenter proposed to check out this JSON-RPC library. Many things happened since but eventually I was able to get some first-hand experience with this library.

First, deploy the server part (in the server/ directory) as described at this post (actually, the server is same as the previous JSON-RPC example server). Then deploy the client part and you get the same old batch calculator functionality.

Under the hood, however, a lot of things have changed. Instead of fiddling with the JSON tokenizer and the Apache HTTP library, the JSON invocation is just one line.

This simplicity comes with a price, however. The library only supports JSON-RPC 1.0 which means that there are no batch invocations and standardized exception handling. The client actually pumps the elements of the batch operation one by one into the server which could create hairy transaction consistency problems were the application a real data-intensive system. I could have refactored the server side and I could have sent the entire batch in one request (representing each operation as a JSON array sub-list) but then I would have lost JSON-RPC's simplicity on the server side.

The right way is to implement JSON-RPC 2.0 support in the library. Let's see if I or anybody else has some spare cycle in the new year for this.

That's about the valuable content, now the advertisements. First, please note the LinkedIn share button on the right panel. Try it, I am really curious what it does. Second, my very competent ex-colleague started a business of selling vintage powder compacts. Weird idea, isn't it? If you find it as weird as I did, try out the site, maybe you get some gift idea.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Once upon a time I wrote a nice little post about checkbox focus problems. The guy who originally asked the question was satisfied and went away. While I was looking the other way, a heated discussion started in the comments because the example program had an annoying property: it did not preserve the state of the check boxes when the groups were opened/collapsed but reordered the check marks randomly. Eventually I got a mail whether I could put my example program right.

So I did. The cause of the trouble was the adapter backing the expandable list view. It was a SimpleExpandableListAdapter which, as its name implies, is simple. In particular, it is not able to feed data to check boxes because they require boolean state while SimpleExpandableListAdapter supports only Strings (here is a posts that explains the relationship between views and adapters). The solution was to write a custom ExpandableListAdapter and the random check mark reordering disappeared.

About the blog

This blog is a personal diary about my adventures with the Google Android platform. I write it in the hope that others may find my experiences useful but please, beware. The blog is created as I gain experience about the platform myself so errors, omissions, etc. may be found in the entries.